3,571 different types of cloud services were in use amongst the survey's participants and, on average, each company involved uses 24 cloud services for file sharing, 37 for content sharing and 91 for business collaboration.

SkyHigh expressed concern at the lack of adequate security features on the majority of these services. The data revealed that just 16 per cent of the 3,571 in use featured multi-factor authentication, and only 11 per cent encrypted data.

Almost 30 per cent of respondents said that their cloud systems had experienced hacking attempts from anonymous outsiders.

Perhaps most worryingly of all, 18 per cent of companies involved in the study admitted that they were using – on average – 1,000 computers running Windows XP to access public cloud services, and 33 per cent of the cloud services used by companies were open to the massive Heartbleed bug.

Support for Windows XP ended at the start of last month, but many enterprises failed to migrate their business operations away from the platform in time. Those that still haven't made the move are placing their systems in serious danger.

It is a similar case with Heartbleed, which made waves through the world of technology when it was discovered around the same time.